


i wasn't looking for you (but oh, wasn't I?)

by idontreallylikebutterflies (Laulerelelere)



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: D&D universe but no one knows aasimar exist also I use modern day cryptids because it was easier, Don't Take This Too Seriously, F/F, First Kiss, Getting Together, M9 cryptid hunters AU, Yasha is MOTHMAN
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-12
Updated: 2019-06-12
Packaged: 2020-05-01 18:37:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,067
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19183450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laulerelelere/pseuds/idontreallylikebutterflies
Summary: "“Oh. Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck shit. You’re Mothman,” Beau says, even louder than she usually would, staring at Yasha’s wings."Beau has a crush on Yasha and is trying to find out what Mothman is. Somehow, those two things are more closely related than she previously thought.





	i wasn't looking for you (but oh, wasn't I?)

Beau is kind of a disaster. She knows, okay? The last time she put on make up was probably a week ago and she has not washed her face properly since, Caleb and her had a thirty minutes long screaming match last week that she is pretty sure she lost, she doesn’t remember the last time she slept for more than five hours, and the last time she spoke to a girl at a tavern ended up with her being punched in the nose —and Beau can’t even complain about it, because she had deserved it.

The point is —if there is a point left to anything in her life, which she is also questioning—that there are still things she is good at. Maybe she is not good at talking to girls who have their life together in the slightest, or at taking care of herself, or at showing her friends that she cares. She is still good at hunting cryptids, so that is something.

Or, well. At least that is what she thinks.

***

“Any news on Bigfoot?” Fjord asks first thing in the morning. Beau is having problems staying awake after having slept near Jester, known sleep talker of the group, and is thankful for someone breaking the silence.

“Dude, I’ve told you a thousand times: Bigfoot is just a big fucking bear,” she says, mostly for the sake of being contrary.

The truth is that most of the cryptids they have haunted were just regular animals that were terrorizing the population of the town near where they lived. Sometimes they have been magical beasts that were terrorizing the population of the town near where they lived. On a few epic occasions, they have been a rich dude with a lot of free time wanting to scam poor people (those times, Beau makes sure she gets a few extra punches in after she realizes it is just a guy in a suit. Just in case).

The cryptid has never, not once, been what the people thought it was going to be. They have lied about it to the major of the town, a few times, to play up that they were heroes and earn money. They usually tell the truth, though, and the truth is usually disappointing.

They make bets about it, now. Beau has won around half of them —probably because Caleb, who is the only one of them who is 100% convinced that cryptids do not exist, also thinks that betting over which animal it will be this time around is silly— and Jester and Fjord have won the other half. Nott does not bet very often, but she wins every time she does so, which has led Beau to believe that she usually discovers which animal it is first and then places the bet. It is cheating, but she has no way to prove it (yet). Caduceus never bets because he does not seem to care, while Yasha does it sometimes when she is around, but she is terrible at it.

And she is never around, so. There’s that, too.

“You always think it’s a bear,” Caleb whispers, not raising his eyes from his book.

“I think it has to be a cryptid, this time!” Jester says, very loud. Fjord jumps, probably having been convinced that Jester was sleeping over where she’s laying down on the cart. “Bigfoot has been around for a very long time, if any cryptid is real it has to be him.”

“It’s just gonna be a bear—”

“The footprints don’t match the ones a bear makes, _Beau._ ”

***

It turns out to be a bear.

Beau is really glad she won the bet this time around, because it gives her an excuse to be happy. The actual reason why she cannot stop smiling, though, is that when they arrive the inn where they are staying this time around, Yasha is sitting there, nursing an ale. Jester is the first one to run up to hug her, because Jester, unlike Beau, is not a fucking coward. Beau just welcomes her back when they catch up to her, and Yasha’s smile seems so big when it’s directed right towards her.

“Thank you, Beau,” she says, warm. “Jester was telling me that you got right what the cryptid was this time. Anything exciting?”

“It was a bear,” Caleb answers, already sitting down at Yasha’s table. Smart, too, because it was not meant to hold more than two people and they’re going to start rounding tables up any minute now. “It always is.”

“Don’t you act like it was so easy, it was dangerous!”

“Oh, yes?” Yasha asks, sitting straighter on her chair. “Did you have to fight it?”

“Well, no. It was a regular bear, we just run away and let it do its thing.”

“Oh,” Yasha says, voice small. Caleb’s back is to her, but she can see his shoulders shaking with something that could be laughter or could be cringing, so she punches one of them for good measure. At least that sound will break the uncomfortable silence.

“We should all go to bed for the day,” Fjord says, slightly louder than he usually would. Beau thanks him silently. “We spent quite a while being chased by that—”

Before he can finish his sentence, a kid —cannot be older than eighteen—enters the tavern running, nervous-looking and seemingly at a loss for words.

“I— I— Mothman has been seen nearby,” he says. Beau gets up from the table on top of which she was sitting with a jump. “No one should go out on the streets, just in case!”

Beau grabs Caleb’s recently ordered ale from in front of him and finishes it in one go. He was already on the process of getting up, and the rest of the group is looking at her. Yasha has her lips pursed and Caduceus is frowning slightly —he doesn’t like it when they go out without having rested, and it took a ridiculous number of spells out of the rest of them to be able to catch that bear.

It doesn’t matter, though. Maybe this time will be Beau’s time.

“Okay, let’s go!”

***

Beau has history with Mothman. Most of the Mighty Nein don’t want to rule out the existence of cryptids, just in case they exist. Beau knows that most of them are bullshit, which is why she wins so many of the bets. Mothman, though: that’s a different story.

She knows Mothman exists.

It had happened during the third month that they had worked together. They had been staying in the woods and, in the middle of the night, she had seen a figure flying nearby during her watch. It had been big, but she had not been sure of whether it was a bird and she had gotten up to investigate. She had seen a clearly humanoid figure. A winged humanoid figure. She had tried to get closer to it, but she had made a noise and the figure had run away.

The morning after, Beau had tried to explain, but the rest of the group was too distracted by Yasha coming back to pay full attention to her. They had had many questions about her story —like why would a winged figure run away instead of fly off, which Beau did not know. It took them a while to believe that Beau was not joking when she told the story, and that she was fully determinated know what the fuck was up with Mothman.

Once they did, though, they showed her every bit of support, which might be the reason why they are running around the woods surrounding the town where they are staying, with no leads apart from that kid who screamed. It is starting to get dark.

“Maybe we should go back to the inn?” Yasha says after maybe an hour of searching, quiet enough that only Beau hears her. “It’s getting late and we don’t have any leads.”

“Yasha,” Beau says, feeling slightly betrayed. _“Yasha.”_

“Sorry, I just—I am a little bit tired, after the trip. And you fought a bear today!”

“We were just chased by it, but it’s okay.” Beau is a little let down by this, but she’s mature enough to admit that Yasha is right. They have been looking for a very long time and they are exhausted, or at least she is. She lets out a little sigh. “I guess we should get back to the inn to let you rest. I—where are the others?”

They spend an extra half an hour looking for their friends, but Yasha offers her an arm when Beau starts looking like she’s about to fall asleep, so it’s worth it, really.

***  
“I think it’s a bear,” Beau says, decidedly. She can hear Caleb groan beside her.

They are all sitting together around a table, barely awake. Yesterday’s adventures had apparently become somewhat infamous during the night, because everyone in the town knows that they “catch monsters or something”, as Jester had heard some town folk saying when she was listening in on their conversation.

Some rich, important guy had come up first thing in the morning and had told them about this creature that lived in the woods near his lands that was terrorizing his workers and not allowing them to work. They had agreed to free them of whatever the creature was. The workers said that it was something that they had never seen before, a devil maybe —which usually meant it was a bear.

“I think it’s gonna be a goat,” Jester says. Everyone else stays silent. “What? It was a goat that one time!”

“I don’t think it’s gonna be a goat again, Jester,” Fjord disagrees. “Though I don’t think it’s gonna be a bear again, either.”

“Wanna bet?” Beau hits the table with her mug. She knows the answer will be affirmative, so she softly hits Yasha with her shoulder. “Joining in?”

“Oh, no. Not this time, sorry. I’m leaving again today,” Yasha mutters. Beau can barely hear her over the sound of Fjord arguing in favor of the cryptid just being a duck. “I’ll come back really soon, but—I have things to do before I spend a while here.”

“Yasha,” Beau says, helpless. It sounds whiny to her own ears. “Yasha, you just came back last night! We miss you when you are gone, you know?”

Yasha gets a little smile on her face. “I miss you too, Beau.”

Beau thinks about those words—a lot. She thinks about them as they pack up their stuff. She thinks about them as they say goodbye to Yasha and she is brave enough to ask for a hug. She thinks about them as she gets into their cart, and thinks about them all the way to the rich dude’s land. She thinks about them, too, when they spend seven days waiting for the creature to appear, walking around and making jokes, because they are being paid for doing nothing.

She doesn’t think about them when the creature appears, though.

***

Hey, so, bad news? It is not a bear. Worse news? It’s a beast and is out for blood. Their blood, more specifically.

Fighting is what Beau does best, usually. She manages not to get hurt very much, but the fight goes badly so, so quick. Caleb passes out twice, which is not surprising because he is weak, but it is difficult for the clerics to manage.

“Fuck,” Beau says after they have killed the beast. Jester is helping Fjord walk and Yasha is not here, which leaves Beau as the next strongest person to help Caleb. He is not heavy at all, but Beau is exhausted, at this point. “Next time, you guys, we listen to the people when they tell us that the cryptid we are going to fight is dangerous.”

“To be fair, they once told us that about a rabbit,” Fjord whispers. He seems to be whispering because all of his strength has left his body, more than to be stealthy. “That rabbit was not scary.”

“You were scared of it,” Jester says lightly. She, like Beau, has come out of the fight relatively unharmed. “You thought it was creepy! You screamed when you saw it.”

“It was covered in blood at the time, okay—” Fjord starts, and Beau tunes them out, because the argument always goes on the same way.

They eventually arrive to the rich dude’s mansion, where they had been staying, but Beau doesn’t get to cross the door. She sees a pair of wings and a dark humanoid figure in the sky and she screeches.

“Dude! Dude, it’s Mothman.” Everyone else is looking up, but the figure has already disappeared between the trees, and that’s bad, because it means that it’s gonna be harder to find. Beau looks at her friends, sees them hurt and barely able to walk and—

“Don’t wait for me!” She says, and she starts running back to the woods. She hears a few of the others yelling out her name, but no one follows her. “I’ll be fine! Get well soon!”

***

Beau runs back into the woods they just came out of. It’s kind of aimlessly—she did not see where Mothman ended up, so she’s just hoping she will develop supernatural hearing at some point and that will help her out.

She does not, but she does, however, see a clearing a few feet in front of her, and, once she gets there, she sees a winged figure. One that turns around when it hears her, and—

Beau knows that figure.

“Oh. Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck shit. You’re Mothman,” Beau says, even louder than she usually would, staring at Yasha’s wings. Yasha does not answer. “Moth…Mothwoman? A part of the Mothpeople. I—what the hell are you called? I mean. I mean, you’re called Yasha, that’s your name, but what is it called when you have like. Wings?”

“I—I have no idea,” Yasha says, in that quiet tone of hers. “They just appeared one day, you know? Like, poof.”

She makes the wings extend further when she says it. It is kind of adorable.

“Oh. Oh, it’s okay that you don’t know. I mean, we can find out! There’s for sure something in some library. Next time Caleb decides he wants to go spend twelve hours at a library like a nerd I will go with him—”

“You always go with him anyway,” Yasha interrupts. “You like going to the library.”

“Pfsh, okay, but I’m not a nerd,” Beau complains. Yasha gets this little smile, like she is going to contradict her, so Beau continues, “Anyway, what I’m saying is that I will go with him and try to research, if you want me to? I mean. It must be confusing, not knowing why you have wings or something.”

Yasha looks a little shocked. “I think I know why? It’s—It’s probably related to my god.”

“The Stormguy, lord, whatever?” Beau asks. Yasha nods, a funny expression on her face. “Okay, cool, I’ll start by researching him and then will go on from whatever comes up? It might take me a while without Caleb’s help, I’m not a super-fast reader or whatever, but—”

She’s gone into problem-solving mode. She does not know why her first instinct upon discovering her crush is a cryptid she has been trying to hunt is not apologizing, but starting to yammer about theories about her existence. She is saved from her own mouth when Yasha interrupts; “So…you are not going to tell the others?”

“Oh! I’m assuming you don’t want them to know, dude. Do you?”

“No—Not really, not yet. I think Caduceus knows, the other day when I came back, he told me that I should rest because ‘flying like that for long periods of time must be exhausting’, so I kind of guessed.”

Of course, fucking Caduceus knew before Beau knew. Of course.

“—But I don’t think anyone else has realized. Not yet.”

“Oh, I’ll keep your secret then,” Beau says. “I know you’d prefer it if I didn’t know but I guess it’s a little late for that now, huh?”

“Oh, no,” Yasha says. She looks, now that Beau is starting to calm down after all of this situation, dead on her feet. Flying must be exhausting, after all. “I’m okay with you knowing, I mean. I didn’t know how you were gonna react, but your reaction was good. You don’t look like you’re gonna tell on me or going to take me to a circus because I’m a freak or—”

“What the fuck, Yasha? Of course I wouldn’t. None of us would, we are your friends,” Beau spits out, fast, trying to get her point across and those thoughts out of Yasha’s mind as quick as possible. “I mean, you think of us as your friends, right?”

Yasha nods. “I always come back to you,” she whispers, like that explains everything.

“And we always make sure Jester sends you a message when you have been gone for longer than usual, right? That’s because I’m in lov—I love yo—we love you. And, anyway, why do you have to leave all the time? Do your wings have a timer and suddenly they like spread out and it’s flying time, baby or is it—”

Yasha stays in stunned silence for a few seconds. Beau suffers through those seconds; maybe if she does not acknowledge what she just said she can act as if nothing happened. Trying to keep talking until she runs out of either air or things to say —and she knows it is difficult for her to run out of things to say— is a perfectly valid option in her head.

At least until Yasha interrupts her. “Can I kiss you?”

“Is it because I just totally said that I’m in love with you or because you want me to shut up?” Making sure of the reason seems important.

“The former, mostly.”

“Oh.” Beau is nodding eagerly before she even realizes. “Yes, then, of course, I—”

She does not finish her sentence. She doesn’t talk for a while, actually, because she has Yasha’s lips against hers and her hands are on Beau’s hips, holding her, and her arms are so fucking big that—

Beau doesn’t think for a while, either.

**Author's Note:**

> Highlights of writing this fic: ·I wrote “nursing a bear” instead of “nursing a beer” and it was very funny (it was later changed to nursing an ale anyway)  
> ·being able to have beau share my feelings about yasha’s arms, which are “nghghhh….big”  
> Thanks for reading! Leave a comment if you liked it/have any strong opinions about cryptids I should know, i guess. Also English is not my first language, so even though I’m an English major I might make some mistakes (even more so because this was mostly written between 1 and 3 am), lmk if you see any!  
> This is my first time writing about critical role (and hopefully not the last one) so I’m really hoping you all liked it. Leave kudos if you did!


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